The Road Out of Chaos in Syria
“Chaos,” wrote Albert Camus, constitutes “a form of servitude.” That is why true freedom must be a search for order. Yet, because order itself can be unjust and extreme, there is always the impetus to topple it. Camus writes in his greatest book, The Rebel, published in 1951, that ever since the mythical Prometheus rose up against Zeus in the deserts of Scythia, revolt has been a distinguishing characteristic of man. And since it is not enough to topple a regime unless one has planned a new and better order to replace it, Camus devotes an entire book to the morality of revolt.
“When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, order, and unity … and in this way to justify the fall of God.” Camus’ reference to God is secular since when an authoritarian regime maintains a choke hold over its own people, it is usurping the role of God. A people, therefore, can be enslaved twice: first by the regime and second by the anarchy that succeeds its toppling. That is why the celebration of revolt in and of itself, without an idea of what follows, can be narcissistic.
Syria’s rebel leaders, according to their early statements and instincts, appear to comprehend this conundrum. When Syria’s new ruler, Ahmed al-Sharaa, talks about building institutions, getting bus service and electricity restored, and keeping the existing civil authorities of the old regime intact, it is as if he has read Camus. But this seemingly mundane realization about restoring the basic functions of the state has been a long time coming in Syria’s modern history. And it is important to understand why.
Servitude in Syria, whether because of tyranny or anarchy, did not begin with the Assad family regime in 1970. In that respect, the recent spate of news commentary has shown strikingly little curiosity about what preceded Hafez al-Assad and precipitated his rise to supreme power in Syria.
Ottoman imperial rule was followed after World War I by French imperial rule. When Syria finally became independent in 1946, it harbored all the illogical borders, the ethnic and sectarian complexities, and the contradictions of the greater Middle East. It cannot be emphasized enough that in the first quarter-century after independence, Syria experienced twenty-one changes of government, almost all of them extralegal, and ten military coups. There were also experiments with democracy during this period, which always broke down on account of ethnic, sectarian, and regional splits. Post-independence Syria’s first serious ruler was Adib Al-Shishakli in the early 1950s. Dubbed the Syrian Ataturk, he, nevertheless, referred to Syria as “the current official name for that country that lies within the artificial frontiers drawn up by imperialism.” He took power in a coup and was overthrown in a coup.
The elder Assad’s coup in 1970 took the most unstable country in the Middle East and turned it into a stable police state, which he ruled until his death in 2000. But with all of his organization and ruthlessness, he couldn’t easily quell a rebellion of radical Sunni Muslim Arabs from the Aleppo-Homs-Damascus corridor against his own Shia-trending, Alawite power structure originating in Syria’s rugged northwest. At the artillery school in Aleppo in 1979, Sunni Muslim terrorists killed and wounded close to a hundred Alawite cadets. As time went on, Syria seemed close to a bloody Sunni Islamic revolution, a counterpart to the Shia revolution in Iran at the time. This was the background to the elder Assad’s atrocity in Sunni Muslim Hama in 1982 when as many as 20,000 were slaughtered: an event that is almost always portrayed in the Western media out of context, as if Syria were totally at peace at the time. That doesn’t excuse the elder Assad, but it does rob the Western reader of the logic and reasoning behind his actions.
Hafez was haunted by chaos. He always knew how close Syria was to falling apart. Even so, as a journalist who traveled back and forth between Iraq and Syria in the 1980s, I can attest that Assad’s Syria was less oppressive than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In Iraq, you needed a minder to travel around the country and could not punch out your telex copy yourself but had to hand it to a government operator for review. In Syria, I traveled all over the country alone and could go into a post office to punch out my news copy with no one overseeing me. You could talk to people in Syria; there was not the feeling of a concrete block on people’s chests as there was in Iraq.
But there was a catch. Because of Syria’s inherent artificiality, Assad needed an ideology to hold it together. And the ideology was anti-Zionism. Baathism wasn’t enough. The elder Assad’s Syria, local officials constantly told me, was the “throbbing heart” of Arabism, unlike Egypt, which was never really trusted regarding its anti-Israel credentials. Whatever is proposed regarding peace, “we remain steadfast” in opposition to Israel, a public affairs officer told me in Damascus in 1983. Indeed, Syria was the most radical of the frontline states. Thus, in 1974, when Assad grudgingly signed a troop disengagement accord with Israel over the Golan Heights, thanks to the tireless diplomacy of Henry Kissinger, it ended the cycle of Arab-Israeli wars that had begun in 1948. The Egyptian-Israeli accords that followed, however lionized as they were by the media, were less geopolitically significant than the de facto removal of radical, Baathist Syria from the fight.
And the elder Assad paid for it. The Sunni jihadist revolt that began in 1979, though a partial reaction to the Shia revolt in Iran, was also driven by the Alawite Assad’s compromise with the Americans and Israelis, as well as his support for the Maronite Christians in the ongoing Lebanese civil war. The 20,000 dead in Hama was the price of Syria’s utter fragility.
Hafez was a self-made man, full of innate reserve, born in a house of undressed stone in the Alawite mountains to a father who had eleven children by two marriages. He rose through the ranks of the Air Force and took power when he was forty. His coup was virtually bloodless and called a “corrective movement.” Because of his Machiavellian genius, he maintained power until his death in 2000. It was the very longevity of his rule that proved a tragedy since it allowed for his increasingly spoiled and corrupt family to gradually amass a fortune stashed abroad, even as the internal stability he ultimately wrought by defeating the Sunni extremists did not convert his people from subjects to citizens. That is to say, over thirty years in power, he could have built a civil society. But he was so obsessed with anarchy that he demanded a suffocating order. Just as the Soviet Union quietly rotted away during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev from the 1960s to the 1980s, Syria followed the same path under the elder Assad.
Over time it was assumed that Assad’s eldest son, Basil, a career military officer and tough daredevil, would succeed him. When Basil died in a road accident in 1994—he was driving at high speed in a fog without a seatbelt—the mantle was placed on Bashar, a timid ophthalmologist in London. “Think of Basil as Sonny Corleone and Bashar as Fredo,” an American intelligence official once told me. Bashar’s over-compensating cruelty and inability to control the goons and warlords around him helped lead to Syria’s descent into a living hell in the years following the initial promise of the Arab Spring in 2011. It would turn out that the most “steadfast” state opposed to the existence of Israel was never really a state to begin with.
The current, ongoing destruction of Syria’s entire military apparatus, everything from its navy to its chemical weapons plants, by the Israelis is born of decades of mutual hatred between the two states. The elder Assad may have signed a disengagement accord with Israel, but Syria remained a potential strategic threat against Israel until the collapse of the country in the Arab Spring. As for any new Syria that might now arise, Israel will want it weak and permanently defanged. Israel welcomed the Arab Spring in Syria in 2011 precisely because it led to chaos: so that Syria was no longer a menace to the Jewish state.
In the early years following the Arab Spring, there were literally hundreds of militias in Syria with little identifiable sense of national purpose. Camus would not have been impressed. But now we have the possibility of a national leader who appears sensible about governance instead of ideology. And he is home-grown, not the product of an invasion by a foreign power. The fact that he is Islamist might not matter much since, in this part of the world, religiosity is entrenched in a way that it hasn’t been in the West since the days when Europe was known as Christendom.
The question presents itself: can Syria forge a path out of chaos without the need for an extreme ideology to hold it together? To call for democracy is premature. There is no precedent for a successful democracy in the Arab world. What the country’s new rulers must create now is a new and less oppressive order. That would morally justify their revolt and be the lesson of Camus’ The Rebel.
Robert D. Kaplan’s most recent book is Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. He holds the Robert Strausz-Hupé Chair in Geopolitics at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
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